CYBERCRIME

Scam: Inside Southeast Asia’s Cybercrime Compounds

Mark Bo, Ivan Franceschini and Ling Li

Verso, $33.99

In 2022, living in Laos and searching for an apartment to rent, I came across a Facebook post from a desperate parent trying to locate her daughter. All she knew was that the daughter had arrived from Vietnam with a promise of lucrative but vaguely defined work. Upon landing, she had vanished. Eventually, she escaped after being forced to work in a “scam compound” until she’d paid off an invented debt. Once back, she was not just traumatised but too ashamed to speak to anyone outside the family. Sadly, this is a common story in South-East Asia, where about 100,000 such workers in Cambodia and 120,000 more in Myanmar are enslaved in high-security compounds running scams on

See Full Page